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Background

So this is another logging this issue after some frustrating problem sovling process. This is to help future me when I forget the same windows configuration step in another 8-15 months, maybe it’ll help you too.

On Windows 8 you have go in and turn on many individual items to just get an ASP.NET IIS hosted web app running, I’ve a variation of this problem in the past and blogged about it.

This time round it’s basically the same problem, but with Visual Studio upon trying to spin up and attach to an IIS hosted web project kicks up 1 of 3 errors.

Issue

The most common one was:

Unable to start debugging on the web server. The debugger cannot connect to the remote computer. The debugger was unable to resolve the specified computer name.

Which is not helpful, and the posts I found were people trying to remote debug machines or some thing else not helpful.

Other variations included:

… error occured on a send

If you dig further into the windows event store you’ll be sent down an even further wrong path with errors such as:

The program can’t start because SecRuntime.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

Solution

Ensure that you turn on ‘Internet Information Services Hostable Web Core’ along with all the other .NET / IIS feautes you need that I mentioned in the previous post.

One thought on “IIS, Visual Studio, unable to start debugging on the web server.”

I was getting this error when trying to use a custom domain name on localhost.
The fix was to add a line in the ‘hosts’ file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc) to resolve the domain name:
127.0.0.1 customdomain.dev